It’s apple blossom time here, as you can see from these images taken yesterday.
More interesting, it’s wild apple tree blossom time, when the locations of long-abandoned apple trees and orchids make themselves known by their blossoms, which sometimes appear by surprise in the middle of overgrown brushlands:
Even more interesting are the “apple detectives” who will appear when the wild apples finally hang on the branches. Inspired by John Bunker’s fascinating book, APPLES and the Art of Detection, these detectives try to learn local history through finding, identifying, and sampling the types of apples once grown on trees in Maine – the Marlboro in Hancock County, the Black Oxford in Oxford County, Cole’s Quince in York County, Cora’s Grand Greening in Knox County, etc.
Of course, all of these “wild” apple trees were at one time cultivated into a new species by humans. The original apple tree from which all this started is thought to be a wild species in Central Asia, Malus sieversii.
European colonists brought apple trees with them to North America, but they weren’t the first to do so. European fishermen, who previously worked New England’s summer waters, first planted cultivated apple trees on the coastal islands, where the fishermen camped and ate. (Brooklin, Maine)